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Modern large language models (LLMs) are capable of interpreting input strings as instructions, or prompts, and carry out tasks based on them. Unlike traditional learners, LLMs cannot use back-propagation to obtain feedback, and condition…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Adrian de Wynter , Xun Wang , Qilong Gu , Si-Qing Chen

In-context Learning (ICL) is an emerging few-shot learning paradigm on Language Models (LMs) with inner mechanisms un-explored. There are already existing works describing the inner processing of ICL, while they struggle to capture all the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-21 Hakaze Cho , Mariko Kato , Yoshihiro Sakai , Naoya Inoue

Large language models (LLMs) operate in two fundamental learning modes - fine-tuning (FT) and in-context learning (ICL) - raising key questions about which mode yields greater language proficiency and whether they differ in their inductive…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Bishwamittra Ghosh , Soumi Das , Till Speicher , Qinyuan Wu , Mohammad Aflah Khan , Deepak Garg , Krishna P. Gummadi , Evimaria Terzi

Instruction following is a critical ability for Large Language Models to perform downstream tasks. The standard approach to instruction tuning has relied on a specific phase of supervised fine-tuning over curated instruction datasets,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-01 David Ponce , Thierry Etchegoyhen

We study the phenomenon of \textit{in-context learning} (ICL) exhibited by large language models, where they can adapt to a new learning task, given a handful of labeled examples, without any explicit parameter optimization. Our goal is to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-29 Jacob Abernethy , Alekh Agarwal , Teodor V. Marinov , Manfred K. Warmuth

Transformer-based large language models have displayed impressive in-context learning capabilities, where a pre-trained model can handle new tasks without fine-tuning by simply augmenting the query with some input-output examples from that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-18 Hongkang Li , Meng Wang , Songtao Lu , Xiaodong Cui , Pin-Yu Chen

In-context learning (ICL) facilitates Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibiting emergent ability on downstream tasks without updating billions of parameters. However, in the area of multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs), two problems…

Multimedia · Computer Science 2024-07-02 Jun Gao , Qian Qiao , Ziqiang Cao , Zili Wang , Wenjie Li

Safety is a fundamental requirement for autonomous systems operating in critical domains. Control barrier functions (CBFs) have been used to design safety filters that minimally alter nominal controls for such systems to maintain their…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-27 Yuxuan Yang , Hussein Sibai

Large-scale Transformer language models (LMs) trained solely on next-token prediction with web-scale data can solve a wide range of tasks after seeing just a few examples. The mechanism behind this capability, known as in-context learning…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-08 Jingcheng Niu , Subhabrata Dutta , Ahmed Elshabrawy , Harish Tayyar Madabushi , Iryna Gurevych

In-context learning (ICL) has emerged as a particularly remarkable characteristic of Large Language Models (LLM): given a pretrained LLM and an observed dataset, LLMs can make predictions for new data points from the same distribution…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-06-04 Fabian Falck , Ziyu Wang , Chris Holmes

Recent work analyzing in-context learning (ICL) has identified a broad set of strategies that describe model behavior in different experimental conditions. We aim to unify these findings by asking why a model learns these disparate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-27 Daniel Wurgaft , Ekdeep Singh Lubana , Core Francisco Park , Hidenori Tanaka , Gautam Reddy , Noah D. Goodman

Large language models (LLMs) possess broad world knowledge and strong general-purpose reasoning ability, yet they struggle to learn from many in-context examples on standard machine learning (ML) tasks, that is, to leverage many-shot…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Haoyu Dong , Pengkun Zhang , Mingzhe Lu , Yanzhen Shen , Guolin Ke

Humans are capable of strategically deceptive behavior: behaving helpfully in most situations, but then behaving very differently in order to pursue alternative objectives when given the opportunity. If an AI system learned such a deceptive…

In-context learning (ICL) has emerged as an effective solution for few-shot learning with large language models (LLMs). However, how LLMs leverage demonstrations to specify a task and learn a corresponding computational function through ICL…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-17 Yu Bai , Heyan Huang , Cesare Spinoso-Di Piano , Marc-Antoine Rondeau , Sanxing Chen , Yang Gao , Jackie Chi Kit Cheung

The open-endedness of large language models (LLMs) combined with their impressive capabilities may lead to new safety issues when being exploited for malicious use. While recent studies primarily focus on probing toxic outputs that can be…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-11-30 Jiaxin Wen , Pei Ke , Hao Sun , Zhexin Zhang , Chengfei Li , Jinfeng Bai , Minlie Huang

In everyday conversations, humans can take on different roles and adapt their vocabulary to their chosen roles. We explore whether LLMs can take on, that is impersonate, different roles when they generate text in-context. We ask LLMs to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-11-28 Leonard Salewski , Stephan Alaniz , Isabel Rio-Torto , Eric Schulz , Zeynep Akata

In-context learning, where pre-trained language models learn to perform tasks from task examples and instructions in their contexts, has attracted much attention in the NLP community. However, the ability of in-context learning is not fully…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-05-17 Yuxian Gu , Li Dong , Furu Wei , Minlie Huang

In-Context Learning (ICL) enables transformer-based language models to adapt to new tasks by conditioning on demonstration examples. However, traditional example-driven in-context learning lacks explicit modules for knowledge retrieval and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Pan Chen , Shaohong Chen , Mark Wang , Shi Xuan Leong , Priscilla Fung , Varinia Bernales , Alan Aspuru-Guzik

Large language models (LLMs) can perform a new task by merely conditioning on task instructions and a few input-output examples, without optimizing any parameters. This is called In-Context Learning (ICL). In-context Information Extraction…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-14 Chaoxu Pang , Yixuan Cao , Qiang Ding , Ping Luo

Recent studies demonstrated that large language models (LLMs) can excel in many tasks via in-context learning (ICL). However, recent works show that ICL-prompted models tend to produce inaccurate results when presented with adversarial…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-05-21 Xuanli He , Yuxiang Wu , Oana-Maria Camburu , Pasquale Minervini , Pontus Stenetorp